As you may be aware Gnome Shell requires 3d Acceleration, And although virtual box provided 3d acceleration, it does not currently work with Gnome Shell. As is documented here http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell

Now you might say so what? who cares?And if you did it would be because you failed to realize the implication of this over the next year.

When Gnome 3.0 is released it will come with Gnome Shell. Gnome Shell does not have a 2d fallback so if the 3d doesn't work then your stuffed.

So when Gnome 3.0 is released and picked up by all the major Linux distros, Virtual Box WILL NO LONGER WORK FOR ANY MAJOR LINUX DISTRO. Thats correct, in about a years time virtual box will have effectively stopped supporting all the major distros of Linux unless the 3d support is fixed.

Now with such a major problem on the horizon you would expect the Virtual Box forums to be buzzing with info on the problem and what is being done to fix it. But it seems completely silent on the issue, if fact I couldn't find anything about it at all on the main website, forum or bug tracker.

Does anyone know what if anything is being done to address this issue.

Well I don't know what you have been reading. I know they have been working on it and have come a long way in getting it going. You can see that this has been being worked on just by reading the VirtualBox Users Manual. Some support is already available and has been for several versions.Is it there yet? No but I bet it will be by the time it is needed.

And ask the Gnome devs which 3D features of OpenGL they are using and how it all works. Last thing I've read about 3D in VB is that all features of OpenGL are supported for except a few minor ones. Also, if Gnome really is going to shoot themselves, they really need to get a non-3D accelerated environment because driver issues are still a thing of the present.

Just for the record, some Open Source drivers, like the ones for ATi and nVidia cards, don't have full 3D support and some don't even support 3D at all. In order to get real 3D, you need to install the proprietary driver and most distro's give a nice notification about that. But if you can't even get your GUI working because of lack in 3D support, Gnome will die pretty much the same day they release it, most if not all major distro's will not include Gnome 3.0 if it means that new users are left with a CLI and advanced users need to fiddle with config files and support packages.

Gnome is said to be user friendly, they better keep it that way and not kick out users that don't have 3D options.

The GNOME devs are well aware of the implications of relying on OpenGL for the next generation of the GNOME desktop, but are satisfied that it works on enough devices that it's a leap worth taking in order to move forward. GNOME 2.x will likely be supported for some time to come, for those people who need it -- several Linux distros are about to make a LTS release, and they're all going to be based on 2.x, so it's not going away anytime soon.

But anyway... gnome-shell uses Mutter, which is a compositing window manager (based on Metacity) with a Clutter backend. Since it's Clutter that's making the OpenGL calls on gnome-shell's behalf, it might be useful to inspect the Clutter source code to figure out why it works so poorly with VirtualBox. (Which it still does.)

While I would also like this issue fixed, I certainly wouldn't worry about VirtualBox "not supporting Linux" anymore because of Gnome-Shell. There are many, many users who are very dissatisfied with Gnome-Shell, and as such it is highly probable that many distros will not impliment it by default. The distro we maintain (Nexradix), will NEVER adopt Gnome-Shell as the default. We will continue to maintain Gnome2 as long as possible, and if that becomes no longer practical, we will move to something based on XFCE long before we impliment Gnome-Shell. Requiring 3d acceleration just to draw your desktop is insane.

twistedlincoln wrote:While I would also like this issue fixed, I certainly wouldn't worry about VirtualBox "not supporting Linux" anymore because of Gnome-Shell. There are many, many users who are very dissatisfied with Gnome-Shell, and as such it is highly probable that many distros will not impliment it by default. The distro we maintain (Nexradix), will NEVER adopt Gnome-Shell as the default. We will continue to maintain Gnome2 as long as possible, and if that becomes no longer practical, we will move to something based on XFCE long before we impliment Gnome-Shell. Requiring 3d acceleration just to draw your desktop is insane.

Since gnome-shell's design isn't anywhere near finalised yet, let alone coded up and tested, it's really not possible to say at this stage how many users will be "very dissatisfied" with it when it's actually finished (which probably won't be in time for GNOME 3.0 -- more like 3.2 or 3.4, IMHO).

As for requiring 3d acceleration to draw your desktop being insane... well, there are desktop features in Windows Vista/7 and OS X that require 3D acceleration too. The degradation is certainly a bit more graceful with those, though -- with GNOME 3, you'll fall back to a gnome-panel style desktop shell.

Getting back on topic: gnome-shell is a little closer to working in VBox 3.2.10 (on OS X, guest Ubuntu 10.10), but all the text is still illegible. Console output attached.

I found that installing from the OpenSuSE LiveCD of GNOME 3.0 does actually run gnome-shell provided you have the guest extensions installed, which isn't the case with the latest Fedora alpha. However, it's still completely unusable, so there's a good bit of work required from the VirtualBox team here.

It's alpha release. There's no way VB will even attempt in supporting that. Too many things will change and Fedora is known for breaking just about everything with a single update. They've had installer problems with their beta's and whatnot.You can give it a try, but VB devs won't look at it until it's had a lot more development than alpha or even beta stage.

Sasquatch wrote:It's alpha release. There's no way VB will even attempt in supporting that. Too many things will change and Fedora is known for breaking just about everything with a single update. They've had installer problems with their beta's and whatnot.You can give it a try, but VB devs won't look at it until it's had a lot more development than alpha or even beta stage.

I very much doubt that it's anything to do with Fedora or its alpha status. The problem lies with the gnome-shell stack making OpenGL calls that VirtualBox can't handle properly for some reason, a problem which has been apparent since the first development releases of gnome-shell a couple of years ago. VirtualBox 3.x and 4.x have both exhibited much the same behaviour on every different Linux and Unix guest I've tried to run gnome-shell in, up to and including version 3.0.0 of gnome-shell that was released last week.

I'm talking about the state of the OS in general and the required Guest Additions to get OpenGL. No GA, no OpenGL. 3D needs to be enabled though, else it will never work. It's shown in the past that OpenGL works just fine. People have been playing games (TuxRacer anyone?) and used Compiz desktop effects for quite some time already.